The Other Side of the Island

While reporting his story on Mohammed Jawad, Michael Paterniti visited Guantánamo Bay to see firsthand the place where Jawad was held for seven years. This is the oral history of his time there

One’s second impression upon reaching the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay on the southeast spur of the island of Cuba—as one is shuttled from a plane to a U-boat, and then ferried across the bay itself to the base—is that this could be some rough heaven: the forgotten, rocky coastline, the mangrove swamps lining the inlet, the water in flickering shades of kaleidoscopic blue. Along the way, you pass military men and women with a day off momentarily getting to pose as tourists, wearing tropical shirts, fishing from motorboats, or diving. There’s a tropical languor that invites that island feel, a reggae beat, umbrella drinks or coolers of beer.

And yet that vision is tempered by one’s first impression of Guantánamo Bay, that you have simultaneously arrived at the site of one of the most notorious detention centers in U.S. history, "the gulag of our times," as a 2005 Amnesty International Report had it. The proof was captured in the images from January, 2002, when the Bush Administration first opened Guantánamo Bay—or "Gitmo," as it became known. What the world saw were uncharged enemy combatants cowering before American soldiers beneath the chicken-wire of a makeshift holding pen known as Camp X-Ray, the prisoners in shackles, orange jumpsuits, and improvised gas masks. Later came accusations, ones coinciding with the 2004 exposure of events at Abu Ghraib, of verbal and physical abuse at Gitmo that were partially catalogued in the Schmidt-Furlow Report, a Department of Defense investigation of interrogative improprieties at the camp.

At its height, Guantanamo’s population of alleged combatants swelled to nearly 800. Today, after hundreds have been released or sent back to prisons in their home countries—and while only six have stood military trial—the population has dipped below 200. In January of 2009, President Barack Obama signed an ecutive order to close Guantánamo Bay within a year’s time, vowing to continue to fight terror but "in a manner that is consistent with our values and ideals." A plan was considered to move a number of detainees to stateside prisons in order to have them stand trial in civilian court. But then, just this week, President Obama tacitly admitted that the prison facility would remain open when he called for the resumption of military trials, albeit with revamped procedures. The move prompted a wave of headlines and stories from across Europe and the Arab world with the conservative-leaning Telegraph calling Obama’s aborted effort to close the facility his "most thorough defeat" and "greatest failure."

So what is Guantánamo like today? It’s a place both haunted by its past and oddly self-assured in its present. It mis an attempt at cultural sensitivity and ahistorical obliviousness. It’s hard to find anyone who’s been working there for more than a year. In order to visit the base as a journalist, one must be invited, as I was last June, along with a French reporter from L’Express. We were put in a nondescript condo at the edge of the base, signed agreements that we would consult our minders before taking photographs or asking questions of personnel, sat through an orientation session in which we were warned against trying to make contact with any detainees, and then what proceeded was a standard-issue three-day press tour, touching on all aspects of the detention center, from the library where favorite video requests include "Tom and Jerry" cartoons and nature shows, to the kitchen where detainees "go wild" for the Shepherd’s pie. Many of the interviewees were not allowed to provide their names for security reasons, but then, no questions were off-limits. At the health center, we were almost casually shown the enteral feeds tubes that detainees on hunger strike use to take different flavors of Ensure daily. The only uncomfortable moments came as a result of our minders’ relentless diligence, following us everywhere, even into the bathrooms for what they claimed were "security reasons."

The following is a brief oral history of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, as recorded on the tour and from a battery of interviews, most especially one I requested with Paul Rester, the head of interrogations at the detention center, who was there at the beginning, and it could be said represents Guantánamo’s institutional memory. While the tour has been repeated over the years for journalists, I was surprised by so many little things: a certain new expansiveness, a pride in what Guantánamo has become, the molecular challenges of everyday, dealing with oppositional detainees, some of whom are waiting nine years later to be charged. History will undoubtedly have much to say about the controversial place called Gitmo, but first here’s what the believers and military have to say.

On Why the Island Was Chosen:

Paul Rester [Chief of Interrogation]: Contrary to the popular belief that Guantánamo was chosen because it was outside the rule of law and [we could] bring people here and somehow conceal them from the world—actually if you read the Geneva Conventions—the requirement to provide certain protections, evacuate the enemy from the battlefield, provide comprehensive medical care, and so forth—in December 2001, there was no place outside of Afghanistan [where we were able to] do that. There was no place that afforded this security. You can’t escape from here.

Zak [Muslim Cultural Advisor]: [There was] a phone call: Get this place ready for detainees coming from Afghanistan. The only place that was ready was Camp X-Ray.

Rear Admiral Tom Copeman [Commander, Joint Task Force]: It was a substandard facility; it was built to house Haitian [refugees] and so when the decision was made to come here—that’s all they had to use.

**Rester: **It would be a stretch to say it was chaotic because it was run with a military precision of sorts, but there certainly was confusion in terms of fog of war-related ’we don’t understands,’ ’we don’t knows,’ and so forth. From a purely military standpoint, the individuals that were brought here were deemed to be belligerent, deemed to pose a threat from the standpoint of capability and intent. It’s not what somebody did, it’s what they are gonna do or might do, and [the idea was to] detain them until we can resolve it.

It was not so much stumbling around making mistakes, but it was learning how to comprehend an environment that we just were not well versed in. And you know, I’ve been chided for, castigated if you will, by Ted Koppel. Ted Koppel said on NPR, Well, you know, the head of interrogation at Guantánamo said that one of the reasons why there was so much chaos and confusion at Guantánamo in the early days was ’fundamentally a lack of experience, a lack of understanding. But I somehow find that disingenuous.’ Well, Ted, I’m sorry if it sounds disingenuous but I was here and I’m one of the guys that was confused and I was frickin’ 50-something years old, and I’m being honest with you. It’s just the way it is.

On Detention Conditions:

**Rester: **So X-Ray is used for about 90 days, as it was determined that there were more [detainees] than the capacity of Camp X-Ray [could handle]. So that’s why Camp Delta was built as a temporary, open-air facility probably not meant to last more than three to five years tops.

**Tour Guide: **It’s a $17.5 million facility—all state of the art. It was built in the United States and brought over in pieces and then put together kind of like Lego blocks.

**Guard: **The guys like it over there because it’s outside all the time. I like it over there—I like being outside. I mean, this is a state of the art facility, this is probably the most up to speed facility anybody’s got. It’s pretty Gucci. Pretty Gucci.

**Rester: **The conditions of detention are no different than those in a county jail or a state prison in the United States.

**Tour Guide: **Our cells meet all the American Correctional Association standards— that’s 80 feet of unencumbered space, which means it doesn’t include the bunk or the toilet or anything. We have two setups here for you: The top being what our compliant detainees get, and the bottom being what our noncompliant detainees get. The main differences being that compliant detainees get three books and two magazines a week, and noncompliant gets two books a week.

**Copeman: **The majority of the detainees here are Yemenis, that’s the biggest chunk of population. And then there’s North Africans, Saudis, some Pakistanis, Afghans—a pretty diverse group.

**Detention Psychiatrist: **These are very communal living conditions for the most part, which is a shift in the way things have been—the detainee population becomes more and more communal each year.

**Tour Guide: **Communal means they can interact with each other [up to] 20 hours a day. They have up to 6 hours of outside recreational. And then inner recreational they have up to 20 hours a day of TV, radio up to 24 hours—although they can only have one at a time, either TV or radio. And they have up to 7 channels of TV.

**Copeman: **Just in this year we’ve gone from 40 percent to almost 80-90 percent of the detainees living communally. It’s up to the detainees, you know, if they want to obey the camp rules, and most of them have gone that route.

**Tour Guide: **We’re very vigilant of their prayer rituals so we have prayer rugs, caps, beads. Every bay and recreation area you’ll see an arrow pointing to Mecca. We offer four classes to the detainees: Art, Arabic to English, Pashto to English, and life skills.

**Copeman: **We just started offering life skills about six months ago. It’s health, how to use a computer, how to write a resume, small business stuff—stuff that might be of use to detainees in their eventual release.

**Tour Guide: **They can have up to eight books or magazines of their choosing. We got about 16,000 books to choose from, about 1,700 magazines, and they rotate them out as they wish. We also offer three newspapers. We really don’t redact very much out of newspapers because they have satellite TV, and by the time the newspapers reach the island they would’ve already watched it on the news.

**Brigadier General Timothy Lake [Deputy Commander, Joint Task Force]: **I’ll go down and walk the detention facility. I communicate with the detainees. I know and they know what we can and cannot do. I cannot open the gates and let you go. I cannot put you on the next flight off of Gitmo. But what we can do is we can schedule a phone call for you, we can schedule a video teleconference or Skype. We can provide you with mail service, we can get you in contact with your lawyer. We can provide you intellectually stimulating events, we can provide you library books, we can provide you magazines, provide you newspapers. They’re very much aware as to what’s going on both nationally and internationally too—they have big screen televisions down in the detention facility, and when news comes on it comes on. We don’t go in and say, ’Oops, turn it off.’ We’ve already vetted the station. You wanna watch CNN, you can watch CNN. No one’s gonna be turning it on and off and doing all that.

We redact some information out of the periodicals or the books and the newspapers because they have asked that they don’t want to see skin. You know, USA Today comes in, the Egyptian newspaper comes in, and if there’s a picture that’s explicit and they don’t want to see it, they will let us know. To avoid that we’ve instructed our resource library folks to take a look at it—if it’s not in good taste from a religious perspective, we’ll remove it.

I think that we’re doing the right thing here. We can’t make the decision as to what will happen to you. But we’re here to ensure that while those decisions are being made, we’re providing for you personally, spiritually and intellectually.

**Kitchen Tour Guide: **All of our meals are made daily—breakfast, lunch and dinner. The [preparation] is kept separate from the main troop feeding because a lot of the meat they have is halal, so we cannot get that mid up with regular meat that we use for the troops. Their favorite meal is Shepherd’s pie. They love that. I love it. It’s very good. That whole day is their favorite day. There are times where they don’t really care for what we have, but we try to accommodate them the best we can.

**Zak: **Every year it just gets much better. I mean this year, guess what they’re watching? The World Cup, live. Why did we make it available? Because of their behavior.

**Lake: **One request that we can’t honor is that they want to go and play soccer on the turf against the guards. And it’s like, with all love and respect, that is just one that’s uh, that’s not permissible.

On Allegations of Torture:

**Rester: **The Guantánamo that everyone loves to hate ceased to exist by the fall of 2003. Every assertion or allegation made, I can trace to that period.

**Zak: **When I first came here, you know, I had a certain picture in my head about Guantánamo just like everybody else had—the pictures you’ve seen on TV.

**Copeman: **You’ve seen it, the picture of the twenty guys in the orange jumpsuits kneeling in the gravel with the guards around them, I mean, that’s the picture in 95 percent of the stories.

**Zak: **No torture was taking place here. What do you call it, waterboarding? Never happened here. These things are exaggerated. Why? Because we are the United States of America so every breath we take the whole world is gonna look at it differently. I mean, when a detainee dies around here, it’s big news. How many detainees kill each other in the prisons in Iraq? Trouble happens, it happens in any camp in Afghanistan or Iraq. Nobody talks about it. But if a detainee cuts his finger here, it’s a big story. ’Oh, the guards must have done it to him,’ you know? We are in a politically strategic place with everybody looking at us with a microscopic eye. My opinion? There’s nothing wrong going on here. From the time I was here in September 2005 to this day. Even when we have detainees not behaving, everybody is following the law.

**Rester: **The truth of the matter is most of these guys were treated very well. And those that make claims to the contrary are doing so out of self-defense because they really don’t want their pals to know that they weren’t tough guys—they have to maintain this persona. So they get out and they make these claims, ’This happened to me, that happened to me,’ so on and so forth. The truth is incredibly simple and incredibly benign, and it just doesn’t sell, you know? ’I go home, I want people to think I’m a hero, I toughed it out, and they did all these horrible things to me.’ I don’t want to go home and say, you know, ’I watched sixteen channels of television for a year.’ That just doesn’t get the girls.

On the Guards’ Behavior:

**Rester: **You’ve seen the Guantánamo of today. This is not a Potemkin village. That’s sixteen channels of satellite, three flavors of ice cream, six menus a week, and 88 percent, you know, communal. Can you imagine, in 2002, with four smoking holes in the ground and a nation in great apprehension, if we had brought several hundred people here, put them in an air conditioned facility, given them art classes, and sixteen satellite channels to include Al Jazeera? Can you imagine?

So it’s not a case of having made mistakes, it’s a case of working through the processes, and evolving and trying to do the right thing, even though the entire universe really believes the contrary. And there’s really no refuting that. It’s not so much that mistakes were made, it’s that there was a lack of comprehension of what the circumstances were. There was a lack of understanding in how to approach this difficult-to-identify enemy.

**Copeman: **With the exception of one guy, there’s nobody convicted of anything here. Like in the United States, you know, until you’re convicted of something you can’t say, ’He killed an American troop.’ They may have all, you know, there’s guys that fess up to it and I’ve had detainees look me in the eye as recently as two weeks ago and tell me they’re my enemy and always will be my enemy. I got it but you know, I’m not gonna say, ’Hey, open up the cage and let me in there.’

**Rester: **There’s a lot of stuff these guards put up with, and they’re expected to be rigidly disciplined. If he goes against instructions—even if he looks like he’s going to react to a provocation—that sergeant will be facing an Article 15, commander’s punishment, or worse. I don’t want their posterity to be rooted in ’Guantanamo’s a stain on America,’ because these kids ain’t a stain.

**Zak: **Everybody who comes to the island goes through training classes. Mine is one of them. I tell them, you know, yes, in this one hour of class you’re not gonna learn about other people’s culture, but here are the things that you need to recognize right away: How does a detainee look when he’s praying? What do we do during the fasting month of Ramadan? When does the month begin, when does it end? What happens during that month?

**Guard: **I would say about 40 percent of training is going over prayer and religion. And the training looks at the worst-case [scenarios], because if you can handle the worst, you can handle the everyday.

**Copeman: **The guards get fairly extensive training including simulated body fluid attacks, so they get used to—I mean, the first time it happens to them on the block isn’t the first time it’s happened to them. And there’s the Joint Stress Mitigation and Restoration Team, which is a psychologist and four psych techs—corpsmen that are trained in that. The corpsmen are always out on the blocks, asking how you feeling, what’s going on, all that kind of stuff. When a feces assault happens, the guy is removed from the blocks, he’s cleaned up, checked out by medical, the JSMART guys come and talk to him, and 99.9 percent of the time, the guy puts a new shirt on, a new pair of pants, brushes his boots and goes back on the block. They don’t want [the detainees] to let them know that it gets to them.

**Guard: **Me personally, I’ve only been assaulted twice. A detainee spit on me one time because he wanted to go to a different camp. His exact words were, ’I don’t wanna be here anymore.’ I said, ’Hey man, your request is in.’ And he said, ’Okay.’ And then he spit on me. He spit on me just so he would leave the camp. I got relieved, and I went to medical, got cleared, and then my chief let me go home for the rest of the day.

The other time I was working in the same place, different section of the camp, and one of the detainees was just acting up. He didn’t want to be here—I mean they all don’t want to be here—so he threw feces at me and the other guards that were standing around. I got relieved, got checked out by medical. Usually there’s nothing you can do as a guard. My job is not to punish the detainee or tell the detainee he’s wrong. That’s not my job—I’m here to be a guard, I’m here to watch him to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself or anybody else. I’m not here to judge him, or say, ’You threw feces at me, I’m going to do something back to you.’ It’s not my job.

**Guard: **In my case, I’m pretty lucky. I treat everybody the way I’d want to be treated, I don’t hold a grudge against anybody, so I don’t have a problem with any of them. Even the guy that spit on me—when he came back to the camp there was no snubbing. Not mad at me, nothing.

On Interrogations:

**Rester: **Military intelligence is about capability and intent. It’s preventative. You take the enemy’s resources out of the battle area and you hold them until they are no longer a threat or the threat diminishes or subsides. Our interest was to a great extent, capabilities, plans and intentions. We wanted to talk to people about their training curriculums. Where did they train? How well did they train? What weapons were they trained on? Who were their associates? How were they organized? And we learned a great deal about that.

Believe it or not because nobody else does, the fundamental military intelligence process is in the open, in an army field manual. There are prescribed techniques that comport with U.S. and international law, and that’s in the manual under the Law of Armed Conflict.

The primary methodology [for interrogations] was to have a conversation—compel them to actually sit down in a chair and listen to the questions, encourage them to be helpful. And our folks were actually going out of pocket, buying McDonald’s and pogey bait we’d call it, you know, snacks and stuff, and literally trying to make the environment as cordial as possible under very austere and very unpleasant circumstances.

In 2006 it was mandated that no detainee would be compelled to leave their cell to have a conversation with any of my personnel. You know what? Didn’t do anything to the statistics. Still had the same number of interviews, had the same number of refusals, still had twenty people a week asking to see their interrogator. Because they want the social interaction—they want to get out, they want to move around. They want the opportunity to inform or dis-inform. Because it’s a conduit for knowledge in both directions, because the one thing that incarcerated people need, thirst for more than anything else is information.

The interrogation doesn’t begin until somebody asks a question and somebody answers a question. The techniques are motivations to [get someone to] actually engage. You know, you approach me directly, ’I’d like to talk to Mr. Rester,’ you know, I’m gregarious, ’Okay, I’ll have a conversation with you.’ And in the military genre there are seventeen approved approach techniques, which looks just like any, you know, cop book. You might call something Mutt and Jeff, it’s good cop/bad cop—a lot of acting, a lot of posturing. We’re really engrained, in an Army way, with the first 72 to 96 hours after a uniformed prisoner is captured, you want them to continue to be apprehensive. We don’t like to use the word ’fear’ anymore, an older approach might be "fear up," to increase that apprehension or anxiety. Police do it all the time.

On Medical Care and Hunger Strikes:

**Doctor: **The most common injuries that we’ve seen recently are associated with trauma related to soccer: Ankles, shins, knees.

**Medical Officer: **We have very few inpatient behavioral health-related detainees. Most of their care is an outpatient basis, and the techs and the nurses go to them as needed. We do have one psychologist and one psychiatrist, and often they [say] that the pathology that they see is very similar to the pathology you’d see in a detained population in the States. Maybe even a little less than you would see in the prisons that they have in the United States.

**Detention Psychiatrist: **So in the States you might have 20 to 40 percent of the population with a significant mental health disorder, something like major depression or psychotic disorder or something like that. Here, it’s like 10-15 percent of the population with a significant mental health issue. The majority of the stressors here are detention-related, adjustment disorder things, the expected reactions that you would have associated with detention: mild anxiety, mild frustration, irritability, that kind of thing, just associated with being here for eight years. The expected reactions anybody would have in detention, not significant psychiatric illness. We provide psychotherapy, we do some meds management—the same things we would do with any patient back in the States.

The other thing that’s going on is that they receive a great deal of support from each other. Somebody seems to be stressed—they look out for each other. Whereas up in the States, somebody thinks you’re not mentally well, they don’t want to have anything to do with you. But here people take care of one another, there’s a lot of support.

**Medical Officer: **There’s a very small population now of hunger strikers, and even smaller of those who require enteral feeds. The feeds that we’ve done on my watch have all been voluntary, where they walked to the feed chair and the feed tube is sometimes facilitated by the detainee or placed without effort. Usually you numb up the area you’re gonna be placing it in, lubricate the tube in advance of the feeding, and then under the supervision of a registered nurse the feed is conducted. [They’re fed] twice a day. And actually, the most popular [feed] right now is butter pecan. You don’t taste it when it’s going down the enteral feed tube, but sometimes you burp afterwards, you know, you get the taste then.

**Lake: **We’ve had several hunger strikers, but we’ve been doing very well recently because once they get into the communal environment they say, ’Well, damn. This is significantly better than where I was.’ We have several folks who have hunger striked for many years. You know, not eating, not eating, not eating. Being enterally fed. Why are they doing it? Because [they’re] making a statement, this is [their] way of positioning [themselves] in the big picture.

**Zak: **We went through a period of time where people tried to hunger strike and to get attention, you know, they tried to commit self-harm. I mean [that they] used it as a tool to get what they want, okay? To get to move to another location. When people say ’self-harm,’ the only real self-harm, you know, are the ones who succeeded. These are the ones who really wanted to do it no matter how much we were watching them, and they succeeded. Everybody else after that—it’s just an act. The only real ones are the ones who succeeded. And we still have people every day pretend to be…’Oh I’m depressed,’ just to get attention. I mean, the morale of the detainees is so high, just you go to the camps and you’ll see.

On What Happens Next:

**Rester: **You are required under the Conventions to protect detainees from public curiosity. They’re not proven guilty of anything; they’re just combatants in detention. Why would you want to expose poor Mustafa to a lifetime of being branded a terrorist when maybe he’s got a chance of going back and having a good life?

We have detainees who we correctly assessed and who we in good faith transferred back to where they came from, who have reengaged and, as we speak, are killing our service members…And that’s just the fact of life. We’re not the world’s jailer, and other nations should take responsibility for their citizens. You know, U.S. citizens who were involved [in terrorism overseas] and picked up and were taken to the United States and they were prosecuted and they were incarcerated. U.S. citizens. Now, I’m not gonna get into policy, but I don’t feel encumbered to resettle anybody else’s citizen in my particular county. If they came from France or Belgium or Holland or wherever they came from, they should go back.

Our job here is to detain them for as long as the President’s authority says to detain them, and to [provide] safe, humane care and custody [that is] legal and transparent. That is not something that we just take for granted. We’re mocked for it constantly but you know, so what? I’m here and the critics aren’t, so that’s okay.

**Zak: **We’re using common sense—that’s why January 22, 2010 came and went and we’re still here. If a mistake was made to open this place in a hurry, it’s not going to be closed in a hurry.

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